It's Official: Musicians' Brains Are Different

I read a few years back that cab drivers in London grow a larger hippocampus in their brains as they gain what's known as "The Knowledge" (of the city's roadways), but I hadn't heard of any similar thing going on with musicians.

According to neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, musicians' brains differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, including having a stronger connection between the left and right sides of the brain (from an NPR interview):

"Gottfried Schlaug- up at Harvard... used brain imagery to measure the sizes ofdifferent parts of the brain. He found first, for example, that thecorpus callosum - the big band which unites the two hemispheres of thebrain - tends to be larger in musicians. And then he found enlargementsof the cortex, the grey matter, in the auditory parts of the brain, andin motor parts of the brain to a degree which may be almost visible tothe naked eye. So that, say, if one looks at pictures of brains, youmight not be able to say this man is a genius or this man is a fool, orthis man is a visual artist, but you could probably say that man is amusician."

Still no word on what's up with drummers.

(image from morphonix)